What is the Craziest Thing You Ever Did When You Were a Teenager?
New Quora answer, 12/19/24:
What is the craziest thing you ever did when you were a teenager?
I have two things.
Both of them involve risky behaviors.
I have a caveat: I believe that my Fight, Flight or Freeze response is a bit unusual for a woman.
The first thing: When I was 13, I was skiing at Sugarbush, a Ski Resort I grew up going to (so I had a lot of experience there and I felt very comfortable on those slopes). However, this one time, I was riding the chairlift up to the top of the mountain, and, when I reached the top, my right foot got caught in the footguard of the lift as I was supposed to get off of the chair.
I panicked.
I did not think about the fact that there was a lift attendant and that he could help me.
I jumped.
I was thinking to myself: I don’t want to ride this lift all the way down the mountain, half on and half off of it! I will fall!
So, instead, I jumped off.
I left my right ski behind and I just jumped.
As I was in the air, I realized that I was going to hit my head on an iron bar located just ahead of me.
I contorted my body in midair and managed to fling myself backwards (no mean feat, considering I had two poles in my hands, and a ski still attached to my left leg and all of the winter gear and the two very heavy ski boots on my feet, not to mention my forward momentum from jumping off of the lift).
I managed to miss the iron bar. However, I did hit an icicle with the right side of the top of my head and it became lodged in my head.
I did not really know about that, at the time. All I knew was that I had hit my head on something, it hurt, but I was OK and, importantly, I was no longer attached to the chairlift.
I was extremely embarrassed, though. My Dad was there and he helped me up. The lift attendant had of course stopped the lift as soon as he realized there was a problem (I had already jumped, though). I knew that my head hurt worse than it should, but I shrugged off the pain because I felt so embarrassed for what I had done.
I collected my right ski (it was fine, thank goodness), and I was able to ski down the mountain. I did a few more runs after that, but I wasn’t feeling great (my head started to throb, at one point), so I told my Dad I was done for the day.
When I went inside the lodge and took my hat off for the first time since I had jumped, I saw a lot of blood. It looked like a blood bath inside my hat. Blood started to drip down my face. I immediately put my hat back on, grabbed some napkins from a nearby table and stuffed them up into my hat.
Oddly, I chose to ignore this information. I don’t know why. I can’t explain it. Maybe, it has something to do with hiding your wounds as part of a “survival” mechanism? Don’t show your weakness to others? In any case, I didn’t tell my Dad or my sister (who was there skiing with us, too). I just told them that I was cold and I kept my hat on.
Periodically, I would stuff more napkins and take out the used napkins. I always ignored the blood soaking them.
Finally, we were leaving the lodge and heading back to the car. We were getting into the backseat of the car together when my sister noticed that there was blood dripping down the side of my face.
She gasped. She said, “Julie! What is wrong with you!”
My Dad, who had been about to get into the car, came around and yanked my hat off of my head. Instantly, blood gushed everywhere down my face. My sister screamed. I think I started to cry (I can’t really remember that part). My Dad looked shocked but then he put the hat back on my head and said, “OK. We’re going to the ER. Now!”
I said, “I’m OK. Let’s go home first, then I can change out of these clothes and then we can go to the ER.”
He argued with me for a bit but then agreed with me. So, we drove about 40 minutes home, I changed out of my wet ski clothes and he did the same and then we drove up to the hospital.
The doctor removed a piece of icicle from my head and needed to give me 4 stitches to cover the hole. My Dad told the doctor the story of how it happened while we were waiting for it to be cleaned and stitched up and the doctor looked at me and said something like, “You wanted to stop skiing that badly, huh?”
I laughed.
Sigh.
The second thing: I was 14 or 15. I was sleeping in my sister’s room because my room was being re-painted. It was either Spring or Summer, so I had the windows open.
At some point in the night, I woke up to the sound of breaking glass. In my head, I saw our car in the driveway being hit with a baseball bat. That was the image that came into my head.
Somehow, I was out of bed, with a baseball bat in my hand, running outside. I got to the patio and realized that: 1. I was barefoot. 2. I was wearing a very short nightgown. 3. I had a baseball bat but what was I really going to accomplish with that weapon, if they had one, too?
I came back to my senses. I slowly creeped out to see what was happening in the driveway. When I peeked my head around the hedge, I saw that both of the cars were fine, no glass was broken, nobody was around, and there was nothing for me to do except to go back inside and back to bed. I thought the whole thing, at that point, was a dream.
The next morning, my neighbor stopped me and asked me if I had heard anything during the night before. I said, “Yes, actually. I thought I heard glass breaking.” He told me that his car had been totally smashed in the night (his headlights, his windshield, the back window, and all of the passenger side windows). I was totally shocked. I had convinced myself that I had imagined it.
In actuality, the sound had carried farther at night and what I had thought was right outside my window was, in fact, across the street.
Scary.
Those are the two craziest things I did when I was teenager. Thanks for asking me!
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